Tua Tagovailoa is about to get wildly paid by Chris Grier and the Dolphins

If you're spending your nights tracking which eligible quarterbacks are about to get signed to massive deals, you hit a tipping point. Trevor Lawrence just signed an unreal contract extension with the Jaguars, taking home $275 million. Yup, that's bad news for the Miami Dolphins.

Objectively, that's a ton of money for a guy whose claim to fame is having a disgusting first half against the Chargers in the Wild Card Round of the playoffs two years ago, only for Justin Herbert and the gang to vomit all over themselves - Jacksonville eventually, somehow, won that game.

Tua Tagovailoa is the next QB up to land a huge contract extension

Like everyone else, I thought there was no chance Lawrence, after three seasons (one of them with Urban Meyer), would end up being a mid/basic QB in the NFL. After watching what he did at Clemson and projecting that to the pros, it was a collective no-brainer that he would at worst be a middling Pro-Bowl level QB. But fate, in its infinite wisdom, has had other plans:

This isn't to say that Lawrence can never string together some high-impact seasons. But as of now, that hasn't happened.

How does this relate to Tua Tagovailoa besides the obvious reasons?

If my math is adding up correctly, then it looks like the only QB that still needs to be signed to a long-term deal from the 2020 and 2021 QB draft class besides Jake Fromm and Kyle Trask (yes Jordan Love still needs to be signed but let's make fun of the other guys for a second) is Dolphins QB Tua Tagovailoa.

The Miami stud brings out many emotions from pretty much everybody. A more polarizing QB over the last four years is hard to recall: he started on the bench recovering from a major hip injury and got thrust into the starting role for no good reason. Tua struggled a bit, and had the head coach and the entire organization trying to outsource his job to others, but got put on track by Mike McDaniel. Unfortunately, he suffered multiple concussions in 2022 in a season he was showing real growth, but then came back and led the NFL in passing yards this past season.

With all of that, Tagovailoa is up for a massive contract extension from general manager Chris Grier and Co. It's an extension that all parties involved have said will get done, but here we are with Tagovailoa being just about the last QB left to get signed.

You can understand where the Dolphins have some trepidation about locking him up long-term with his injury history. It's a legit thing and Tagovailoa did an excellent job showing that he can protect himself from the concussions he suffered the year in '22. Sure, any player can suffer a concussion, but Tua has gone above and beyond to transfer anti-head smashing into the turf techniques to the gridiron.

With Lawrence getting his big payday, all signs point to Tagovailoa getting a deal comparable to that soon. Sorry to all the haters out there who think this shouldn't happen and that the signal-caller should play this season on his fifth-year option. There's just no world where he steps on the field in Week 1 against those same Jaguars without a long-term deal. You can cry about it all you want, but this is simply how the NFL works - one guy gets his money and the rest follow.

Once Jared Goff got his extension, it was open season for teams to sign their guy. It was just a matter of who was going to sign first. You could say that the Dolphins messed up by not signing Tagovailoa before Lawrence, which is tough to argue with. Now, if you're Tagovailoa, why sign for less than Lawrence when you have put up better stats over the last few seasons?

Regardless of everything, Tagovailoa is going to get paid big time sooner rather than later and it's going to be for the same kind of money that Lawrence got. When it will be is anyone's guess. Maybe this weekend, maybe in early August. Just know that regardless of where you stand with him, it's happening.